die nachstehend im Wallstreet Journal vorgestellt werden und neben Metastorm, die gesetzt sind, einer der drei weiteren Kandidaten der insgesamt zwei vorgesehen Monetarisierungen von größeren Beteiligungen sind.
In Search of the Cheaper Meeting
Planning corporate gatherings is getting a lot easier—and a lot less expensive
By MELANIE TROTTMAN
March 31, 2008; Page R5
Lee Ann Adams Mikeman recalls when planning big corporate meetings required hours of phone calls, mounds of faxes—and the shock of discovering the total cost months later.
Now, the assistant vice president for conference planning and special events at SAIC Inc. says, meetings are being planned in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the labor.
SAIC, a San Diego-based technical-services provider, is one of a growing number of companies using innovative online technology to wrap their arms around what many consider as the last frontier of travel-and-entertainment spending: meeting planning and management.
While companies have gained better control over spending on air, hotels and rental cars—in part by moving their purchases to the Web—corporate-meeting planning has remained more of a free-for-all. Departments often use different methods to choose vendors and negotiate contracts, and data about the spending rarely get consolidated for analysis.
People who aren't allowed to buy a laptop without approval can end up spending $200,000 for a meeting, says Michael Boult, the former chief executive and current board member of StarCite Inc., one of the largest meetings-management companies.
Having the proper tools can carry through to the bottom line. A corporation that doesn't know how much it spends with each of its vendors can miss opportunities to leverage purchasing power for discounts. Similarly, lack of oversight on hotel contract negotiations can result in huge meeting-cancellation fees that companies could avoid by negotiating flexible terms.
Spending on U.S. corporate meetings is expected to grow to $75.8 billion this year from $73.4 billion in 2005, according to a study released last year by PhoCusWright, a corporate-travel research firm based in Sherman, Conn. Meanwhile, there's an increasing interest in using online tools to manage small meetings of 25 people or less, says Norm Rose, PhoCusWright senior corporate and technology analyst. Of the corporate meetings expected to book this year, at least 60% of the travel portion will be done online, he says.
StarCite, based in Philadelphia, has become the main choice for a comprehensive technology tool to plan meetings from beginning to end, in part because it has merged with or acquired several top competitors over the past several years. There are also niche tools in high demand, since some companies don't need a comprehensive solution. Passkey International Inc., Quincy, Mass., for example, is focused on assisting with group hotel reservations. Certain Software Inc., San Francisco, helps manage online attendee registration and management. ConventionPlanit.com of North Potomac, Md., provides an online directory of resources for meetings professionals. Some of the consumer-focused travel Web sites are also in the space, such as Expedia Inc., Bellevue, Wash., which offers meeting-planning capabilities for leisure and corporate travelers. Some newer entrants such as Groople Inc., Englewood, Colo., and Group Travel Planet LLC, Sevierville, Tenn., have largely targeted smaller, unmanaged, leisure group travel.
Kevin Johnston, CEO of Advantage Event Group, an Atlanta-based event planner, uses Passkey to help his clients manage their hotel needs. The biggest risk clients have is not keeping abreast of the real number of rooms they need; bad estimates, cancellations and no-shows can cause a planner to wind up on the hook for a contract to pay for many more rooms than were needed, says Mr. Johnston, who has seen companies pay hotels as much as $40,000 in penalties. Passkey helps the clients track bookings and cancellations in real time and keeps a history of how many people tend to register for a recurring event, and at what pace. The technology also helps hotels gauge whether a client's block of reserved rooms is excessive, and enables a link between a person's hotel reservation and conference reservation, so if someone registers for the conference but hasn't booked a room that will be transparent, Mr. Johnston says.
Hotels pay a licensing fee to Passkey for use of the technology and often let clients use Passkey at no charge.
StarCite, for its part, offers a variety of meeting-management services—from gathering hotel bids to sending electronic invitations and tracking registrations online. Once registered, the attendees can seamlessly use StarCite to book airline tickets and hotels online if the company planning the meeting has integrated its corporate-travel booking tool with StarCite. VIPs can receive discreet invitations to private receptions. Companies can route attendees' flight arrival times to ground transportation providers. And when the meeting is over, attendees can offer feedback online.
Planners can also use StarCite to view an online calendar that displays the status of all planned meetings, along with color-coded designations for each department. Companies say the best use of the calendar is its ability to display accumulated hotel reservations that were canceled earlier but can still be used to avoid paying big cancellation fees.
Cutting Losses
SAIC's Ms. Mikeman began using a meeting-planning technology five years ago from SeeUthere, a company that managed attendee registration and later became part of StarCite through a merger. She and her colleague Glenn Burgess wanted better controls after incurring big fees for canceled rooms and food.
Within four years, SAIC reduced those kinds of inventory "damages" by 99%, and gained additional efficiencies with the technology's tools for collecting data and managing hotel bids; while it used to take two hours to survey five different properties, now that can be completed in 30 minutes.
The American Cancer Society began using b-there.com in 2001 to help with online registrations, says Terri Clay, a senior director at the organization.
B-there.com was eventually absorbed by StarCite, which now helps the Cancer Society plan meetings for as many as 10,000 people. For one huge lobbying event in Washington, D.C., the society used StarCite to collect and review thousands of application essays from the would-be grass-roots advocates for cancer-related legislation. The technology also helped pair roommates for the event, asking questions about bedtime preferences and gender.
Room to Improve
Users have some gripes about StarCite. The request-for-proposal process, for example, in which suppliers are invited to bid for contracts, could be faster and more streamlined; there could be more customizing; and it could be easier to use for novices. One customer says the technology sometimes gets upgraded without notification, which can cause unwelcome surprises. Another issue: glitches that arise from occasional merger-integration issues.
StarCite says it has grown quickly and is working with customers to continually improve. The company says it is working to speed hotel response times to company RFPs, for example, and is redesigning aspects of its product to make it more intuitive and easy to use.
The company says that it's working to improve notification about upgrades, and that it's committed to managing systems integrations "with as much sensitivity as possible" to customer data and experiences.
Set-up also can be time-consuming as companies customize the tools to suit their own needs. Most companies add functions gradually since testing and internal approvals can take months to complete. For that reason, some companies say they're not yet using all of the capabilities for which they're paying. Some companies haven't integrated their online travel tool with StarCite's technology, for example.
Despite the challenges, the technologies still provide relief. "I'm from the generation that started doing this on a typewriter," says Ms. Clay.
—Ms. Trottman is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau
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